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We're currently in the process of furnishing the 'games' room* in our house and we're planning to get some storage units to go along one wall. I'm interested to know if anyone has recommendations as to the size of cupboards we should look to get. In particular are there standard game box sizes, or is there a largest game box size we should try to cater for?

I imagine there are some games that are ridiculously large, but it would be nice to be able to store all our games in one place.

2 Answers
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If you are looking to buy a shelving unit, Ikea's Expedit bookcase is fantastic for board games. It's available in a wide variety of sizes and most game boxes stack well inside. The modular design also allows you to put drawers or doors on any section you want. We store larger odd-sized game boxes on top of the bookcase.

When we moved into our house, there was a hand-made storage unit in the basement that I ended up commandeering for all my board games because of its near-perfect size.

The interior storage area of each shelf is 9 1/2" tall, 14" deep, and 48" wide. If you make the interior dimensions a little deeper and wider, you should be able to affix doors to the front.

The storage unit has no doors, so a few games hang out by a quarter- to half-inch, but otherwise, the dimensions are spot on, assuming you don't mind stacking games on top of each other.

Almost all of the games I have are no wider than 14", and 1" or 2" tall, which makes things nice and consistent.

To give you an idea of what it can hold, I'm able to fit the following games onto two shelves horizontally except where noted as being rotated 90 degrees with an asterisk:

Shelf 1: Carcassonne *, Puerto Rico, Risk, Axis & Allies, Dungeon, Hunt for Red October, Horus Heresy, two Munchkin games *, Boggle (Horus Heresy and Axis & Allies are stacked on top of each other with no more room; that should give you an idea as to how many "big-box" games you can stack on top of each other)

Shelf 2: Chaos in the Old World, Lord of the Rings, Mastermind, Power Grid, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Scrabble, Monopoly, Upwords

Fireball Island and Battle Masters have to sit on top because they're too darn big.